Charline Von Heyl uses different painterly approaches to maximum effect, depicting form while also referring to various periods in art history. One canvas here, Done Got Old, features a head divided into flat, distorted shapes. It’s a disorderly face evoking a disorderly psyche, but also a tour de force of Cubist shards merging with Pop Art iconicity.
In Von Heyl’s work, a single painting can contain the history of painting, just as each human being retains various selves over the course of a lifetime. Yet she dramatizes this sense of the unfixed within a fixed sense of order. Her canvases may journey from megalithic substantiality to rudimentary marks, from colliding patterns and color to near-empty fields of dissipating lines, but each composition is assembled with an eye toward both decisiveness and contingency.
In Night Doctor, large, abstracted fingers appear to claw the surface of the canvas, altering the space while also cradled by it. The image literalizes the acts of creating and destroying, while the title hints at painting itself as a metaphorical patient—an ailing body forever being revived by the artist’s touch.—Jennifer Coates